The Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt

of famous beauties could be purchased from the sly-looking man or the fat, pale woman. And I rang the cowbell.
    Many eyes stripped me slowly. I saw faces of women that I would never forget. I saw smiles that still ring in my eyes like jeers…
    Ah! The truth is I was tired… but isn’t it written that ‘you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow’?
    And I mopped the floor, asking beautiful women to move their delicate little feet so that I could wipe the spot where theyhad been standing, and I went shopping with an enormous basket; I was an errand-boy… I suppose that if they had spat in my face then I might have peacefully wiped it away with the back of my hand.
    A darkness fell over me, growing ever thicker. My memory began to lose the shapes of faces that I had loved with tearful affection; I began to imagine that my days were separated by wide tracts of time… and my eyes were too dry to cry.
    Then I repeated the words that had until now only had a vague meaning in my life.
    ‘You will suffer,’ I said to myself, ‘you will suffer… you will suffer… you will suffer…
    ‘You will suffer… you will suffer…
    ‘You will suffer…’ My words faded away.
    This is how I grew more mature during that hellish winter.
     
    One night, in July, just as Don Gaetano was pulling the metal shutter over the door, Doña María remembered that she had left a bundle of clothes that had been brought from the laundry that afternoon. So she said:
    ‘
Che
, Silvio, come on, we’ll get it.’
    While Don Gaetano turned the lights back on, I accompanied her. I remember it exactly.
    The bundle was in the centre of the kitchen, on a chair. Doña María, her back to me, grabbed the bundle by its topknot. As I looked around, I saw some coals still glowing in a brazier. And in that briefest of instants I thought:
    ‘Here we go…’ And without hesitation, grabbing a coal, I threw it into a pile of papers that were next to a heavily laden bookcase, while Doña María began walking away.
    Then Don Gaetano turned the key in the fusebox, and we were out in the street.
    Doña María looked up at the starry sky.
    ‘Pretty night… it’s going to freeze…’ I too looked up to the sky.
    ‘Yes, it’s a pretty night.’
     
    While Stinking God slept, I sat up in my pseudo-bed, looking at the white circle of light that came through the bull’s eye from the street and planted itself on the wall.
    In the darkness I smiled at my freedom… free… definitely free, because of the sense of manliness my action had given me. I thought of, or rather, I collected moments of delight.
    ‘Now is the time for
cocottes
.’
    A friendliness, as fresh as a glass of wine, made me fraternise with the whole world in these midnight hours. It said:
    ‘This is the hour of little girls… of poets… but how ridiculous I am… even so, I would still kiss your feet. Life, Life, how pretty you are, Life… ah! But don’t you remember? I am the delivery boy… the servant… yes, Don Gaetano’s… and even so I love all the most beautiful things of the Earth… I want to be handsome and witty… to wear a bright uniform… to stay silent… Life, how pretty you are, Life… how pretty… Lord, how pretty you are.’
    There was a pleasure to be found in smiling slowly. I passed my middle and index fingers over my cheeks. The croaking of car horns that could be heard down there, on Esmeralda Street, was like a hoarse announcement of joy.
    Then I leant my head onto my shoulder and shut my eyes, thinking:
    ‘Which painter could paint the portrait of the sleeping servant, the one who smiles in his sleep because he has set his master’s den alight?’
    Then, slowly, my drunken excitement subsided. An irrational seriousness took its place, a serious attitude of the kind that it is a mark of good taste to display in public. And I felt likelaughing at this ridiculous, paternalistic seriousness. But because seriousness is hypocrisy, and because